I’m on the front page for the keyword on Bing and still dancing on 3rd-4th in Google. No rankings yet on Duckduckgo, but I guess it’s a matter of time till they pick it up.

It’s funny that Google ranks this on top page for “SEO Contest at IIIT Hyderabad” and not for SEOContestAtIIITHyderabad (without commas) — I should “train” it to know that it’s one and the same thing :D

I don’t have access to an Indian IP to track the exact standings. SerpAttack, for instance, reports that I’m on 7th spot in Bing, but the results on the contest page show me on 10th. It doesn’t make a difference yet, because my entry for SEOContestAtIIITHyderabadis still dancing in both SE’s, but some time towards the end of next week I will want to see some more precise results.

I should also add that I haven’t done ANY off-page optimization yet. All current ranks are due to on-page factors (which aren’t by far optimal either, lol) and, of course, me being awesome :P. I still haven’t thought of a linking strategy — might do it some time next week.

So you know I joined the SEO contest yesterday. I registered this blog on WordPress.com and wrote a first post, the “Hello world” type of article, so to say.

Then I pulled some “magic tricks” to get it indexed by Google. Nothing fancy — just a blast of “whois” type of sites on a domain I then 301’ed to the main URL. Google picked it up within a few hours, and Bing was a bit lazier but ended up indexing it after 16 hours or so. I still don’t know what duckduckgo is and how it works — needless to say, it didn’t index it yet.

Right now it’s on the second page in Google and second page in Bing.

Given that I’m not allowed to have more than 10 pages and/or posts, and there are 20 days left, I’ll post daily for 3-4 more days and save the last posts for later. Or not, I’m known to change moods frequently :)